Forests and Natural Resources

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Case Study: Local People and Forest Management in Tanzania

By Elizabeth J Z Robinson*, Heidi J Albers**, Razack B Lokina***

Over the past thirty years, a series of policies have aimed to address rural people’s dependence on forest resources while protecting those forests from deforestation and degradation. Social forestry projects and various participatory and joint forest management programs all aim to involve villagers in the protection of local forests and to enable villagers to capture some direct use value from the protected forests. Individual projects and policies have been deemed successful when the local communities have received benefits. However, the distributional effects of these projects have tended not to be addressed explicitly, and the connection to maintained or increased forest protection, or avoided degradation, particularly at a landscape level, has proven elusive.

Despite the introduction of participatory forest management in many low-income countries, protecting these forests from overexploitation whilst ensuring that nearby forest-dependent households’ livelihoods are not harmed by reduced access to forest resources remains a problem. In Kibaha’s forests in Tanzania, forest reserve policy has reduced access by nearby communities to important forest resources, which leaves those local people with little incentive to stop more distant individuals and groups from degrading the forests through illegal activities such as charcoal production. Forest officials have the incentive, but lack funds and appropriate enforcement strategies to protect the forests. As a consequence, nearby communities are worse off yet the forests continue to be degraded. A key issue is how to enforce forest access restrictions in low-income countries, so as to reduce forest degradation and enable forests to regenerate, whilst reducing the negative impact on nearby communities.

Kibaha’s forests (including the Ruvu North and Ruvu South Forest Reserves) face particular pressures because of their proximity to Dar es Salaam, a large city with high demand for charcoal and timber. Forest managers in Kibaha attempt to protect the forest, meet local village needs, and provide sustainably-produced charcoal to nearby Dar es Salaam. As part of a joint forest management initiative, managers established a buffer zone within the forest reserve in which villagers can grow trees and staple crops. The forest reserve managers undertook this project to provide resources and income sources to local people; to provide fuel for Dar es Salaam; to reforest a degraded area; and to induce these buffer zone farmers to enforce access restrictions into the remaining reserve by “outsiders”, people living distant from the forest. Bee keeping has also been introduced whereby villagers are permitted to keep beehives in the protected forest.

As such, Kibaha’s forest managers are actively trying to balance the needs of local people, Dar es Salaam’s charcoal demand, and forest protection goals. Research conducted in 2012 to explore how Kibaha’s experiences can inform improved forest management, given the reality of limited budgets, provided the following insights.

First, a strategic approach to forest patrols can improve their effectiveness. Specifically, a patrol strategy that monitors and maps where illegal activities occur, and takes account of the spatial realities of the particular forest, can increase the deterrence effect of the limited enforcement budget, and increase the probability of catching people in the act.

Second, the location of livelihood projects can also be a strategic decision by the forest managers. In Kibaha, beekeeping gives villagers a new source of income and provides them with an additional incentive to protect the forest because honey yields depend on forest quality. Bees deter illegal charcoal production near the hives because people both fear being stung and respect the private property of the beehive. Villagers check on their beehives frequently, which increases the likelihood that they see illegal activities in areas of forest near bee hives or near routes to and from the village. Thus, though siting beehives inside the reserve forest further from the village imposes costs on villagers, it can also increase protection of the forest. Forest managers can thus use the siting of beehives strategically to increase the protection of specific areas of the forest.

Third, local villagers can be effectively engaged in protecting their nearby forests, thereby supplementing the limited patrol capacity of the forest service. In Kibaha, villagers themselves collect forest resources from the reserve forest, including whilst going to and from their beehives. However, this resource collection is currently illegal, and therefore these villagers are disinclined to attempt to stop outsiders who also use the forest illegally. Given the reality that villagers continue to opportunistically collect forest resources, under many conditions it may be more appropriate to allow legal collection by local people of fuelwood, forest fruits and vegetables, and forest medicines, which are traditionally collected by rural households for home consumption.  In this way, the villagers will be empowered to protect the forest from outsiders’ illegal activities, particularly charcoal and timber production, which are typically more ecologically damaging than small-scale collection of resources.


Albers, HJ., and EJZ Robinson.  2011. “The trees and the bees: Using enforcement and income projects to protect forests and rural livelihoods through spatial joint production.” Agricultural and Resource Economics Review 40(3):424-438.

Robinson, EJZ., HJ Albers, G Ngeleza, and RB Lokina. 2014“Insiders, outsiders, and the role of local enforcement in forest management: An example from Tanzania.” Ecological Economics 107:242-248. 

Robinson, EJZ., and RB Lokina. 2012“Efficiency, enforcement, and revenue trade-offs in participatory forest management: An example from Tanzania”, Environment and Development Economics 17 (1):1-20.

Robinson, EJZ., and RB Lokina. 2011. “A spatial-temporal analysis of the impact of access restrictions on forest landscapes and household welfare in Tanzania,” Forest Policy and Economics, 13(1): 79-85.

Robinson, EJZ., AK Mahapatra, and HJ Albers. 2010. “Protecting poor countries’ forests: Enforcement in theory and practice”, Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research 2(1): 25-38.


* Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Reading

** Knobloch Wyoming Excellence Chair in Conservation Economics and Finance, University of Wyoming

*** Senior Lecturer in environmental economics, University of Dar Es Salaam

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